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Reinforcement learning can train policies that effectively perform complex tasks. However for long-horizon tasks, the performance of these methods degrades with horizon, often necessitating reasoning over and chaining lower-level skills.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-31 Dhruv Shah , Peng Xu , Yao Lu , Ted Xiao , Alexander Toshev , Sergey Levine , Brian Ichter

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) often exhibit significant redundancy due to symmetries and shared structure across state-goal pairs in real-world Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL). While hierarchical policies have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Clarisse Wibault , Alexander Goldie , Antonio Villares , Maike Osborne , Jakob Foerster

Standard reinforcement learning algorithms with a single policy perform poorly on tasks in complex environments involving sparse rewards, diverse behaviors, or long-term planning. This led to the study of algorithms that incorporate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Ranga Shaarad Ayyagari , Anurita Ghosh , Ambedkar Dukkipati

Accuracy and generalization of dynamics models is key to the success of model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL). As the complexity of tasks increases, so does the sample inefficiency of learning accurate dynamics models. However, many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Manan Tomar , Amy Zhang , Roberto Calandra , Matthew E. Taylor , Joelle Pineau

Reinforcement learning in problems with symbolic state spaces is challenging due to the need for reasoning over long horizons. This paper presents a new approach that utilizes relational abstractions in conjunction with deep learning to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-28 Rushang Karia , Siddharth Srivastava

While the difficulty of reinforcement learning problems is typically related to the complexity of their state spaces, Abstraction proposes that solutions often lie in simpler underlying latent spaces. Prior works have focused on learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Amnon Attali , Pedro Cisneros-Velarde , Marco Morales , Nancy M. Amato

Many real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems necessitate learning complex, temporally extended behavior that may only receive reward signal when the behavior is completed. If the reward-worthy behavior is known, it can be specified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Phillip J. K. Christoffersen , Andrew C. Li , Rodrigo Toro Icarte , Sheila A. McIlraith

Two desiderata of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are the ability to learn from relatively little experience and the ability to learn policies that generalize to a range of problem specifications. In factored state spaces, one…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Zizhao Wang , Caroline Wang , Xuesu Xiao , Yuke Zhu , Peter Stone

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) exploits temporal abstraction to solve large Markov Decision Processes (MDP) and provide transferable subtask policies. In this paper, we introduce an off-policy HRL algorithm: Hierarchical Q-value…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-03-30 Tiancheng Zhao , Mohammad Gowayyed

We consider a Reinforcement Learning setup where an agent interacts with an environment in observation-reward-action cycles without any (esp.\ MDP) assumptions on the environment. State aggregation and more generally feature reinforcement…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-07-15 Marcus Hutter

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is appealing because (i) it enables planning and thus more strategic exploration, and (ii) by decoupling dynamics from rewards, it enables fast transfer to new reward functions. However, learning an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Evan Zheran Liu , Ramtin Keramati , Sudarshan Seshadri , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Emma Brunskill , Percy Liang

This paper explores the impact of relational state abstraction on sample efficiency and performance in collaborative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning. The proposed abstraction is based on spatial relationships in environments where direct…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Sharlin Utke , Jeremie Houssineau , Giovanni Montana

State abstraction enables sample-efficient learning and better task transfer in complex reinforcement learning environments. Recently, we proposed RePReL (Kokel et al. 2021), a hierarchical framework that leverages a relational planner to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Harsha Kokel , Arjun Manoharan , Sriraam Natarajan , Balaraman Ravindran , Prasad Tadepalli

Goal representation affects the performance of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) algorithms by decomposing the complex learning problem into easier subtasks. Recent studies show that representations that preserve temporally abstract…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Mehdi Zadem , Sergio Mover , Sao Mai Nguyen

We propose a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for control with continuous state and action spaces. In our framework, the user specifies subgoal regions which are subsets of states; then, we (i) learn options that serve as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Kishor Jothimurugan , Osbert Bastani , Rajeev Alur

Recent advances in reinforcement-learning research have demonstrated impressive results in building algorithms that can out-perform humans in complex tasks. Nevertheless, creating reinforcement-learning systems that can build abstractions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Lucas Lehnert , Michael J. Frank , Michael L. Littman

We characterise the problem of abstraction in the context of deep reinforcement learning. Various well established approaches to analogical reasoning and associative memory might be brought to bear on this issue, but they present…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-02 Murray Shanahan , Melanie Mitchell

One major limitation to the applicability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to many practical domains is the large number of samples required to learn an optimal policy. To address this problem and improve learning efficiency, we consider a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-07 Roberto Cipollone , Giuseppe De Giacomo , Marco Favorito , Luca Iocchi , Fabio Patrizi

The main focus of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is studying how large Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) can be more efficiently solved when addressed in a modular way, by combining partial solutions computed for smaller subtasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Roberto Cipollone , Luca Iocchi , Matteo Leonetti

Value function based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, for example, $Q$-learning, learn optimal policies from datasets of actions, rewards, and state transitions. However, when the underlying state transition dynamics are stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Udari Madhushani , Biswadip Dey , Naomi Ehrich Leonard , Amit Chakraborty